Content marketing is a method for distributing online content that contains a direct and measurable benefit to the core business.

The starting point often is a business that obviously or subtly sells products or services via the content itself. That’s an important distinction to make because traditional and digital media businesses also distribute online content with direct and measurable benefits to themselves.

But in the case of media, the actual content does not contain the sales message. The advertising around the content does that job.

In other words, a newspaper article or TV clip about a crime or government action don’t contain sales material asking or suggesting that people buy advertising for that newspaper or TV station.

Instead, the most common way for media Web sites to acquire advertisers is through a sales staff that contacts current or prospective clients.

An evergreen content strategy is a surefire way of building a site’s size, value and audience.

The term refers to articles that have a long shelf life. In other words, they may be just as useful to the reader a year from now than the day they were written.

The investment of time, energy and even money in generating such content may not pay for itself in the near future, but a good evergreen article will likely pay for itself in the long term and then become pure profit from that point forward. (more…)